It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

There is another way to oppose a hostile ecosystem: instead consuming non-blessed copies ignore it.

I've been mulling over your desired situation which is probably shared with plenty of parents.

I think you want a system with a walled-garden with a "friend code" like Nintendo has, that can be physically shared through a scanner. You want to be able to supervise who your kids are friends with, and you want it to be extremely difficult to share that information online. Then the kids are strictly, systematically only able to contact and play with each other if they are friends. Maybe friends of friends. Parents get to review content, or professionals are paid to curate content that is allowed in this system.

When someone new becomes friends with your kid, you are notified and can ask who that is. If they seem to not be any of your kid's IRL friends, then you, as the parent, have the power to block that person from your child's games, report them, and notify the other parents of any of your children's friends that you have done so to this user.

It's local, involves the parents' supervision at a higher level. It can probably be abused by kids getting their parent's supervision module and blocking one of their friends and notifying all the parents as a mean joke or something. Or by parents who want to exclude certain children based on not liking their parents, and wanting to make an example of them as a "bad influence". It's also vulnerable to the child lying and saying a stranger is one of their IRL friends. The friend code "badge" getting lost is another serious concern.

A tool to use the friend code scanner at events like birthday parties to get surprise packs could be a "fun" thing that serves a double purpose of displaying each kid's profile, to help keep an offline list that verifies each kid's online identity to their parents, by pairing it with a photo (which never goes online) taken at the time of scanning. And there could be a tool to let you quickly scan that list and compare to the friend network of your kid and their friends. Maybe if there's somebody who consistently never shows up on the "party lists", flags could be raised and the parents could be notified to separately ask their children who that is - if answers are inconsistent, something's probably wrong.

Now, this system would take effort to implement, and effort to get existing games to agree to integrate - and they do need to integrate. Trying to create games to fit snugly into this system from the ground up would be insanely difficult. Maybe it absolutely must run servers of popular games in a "black-box", with this security system on top of it. To the kid's perspective, it needs to feel like barely an extra step to sign in and play through those servers, and on the computers they have access to, the vanilla version of the game needs to be thoroughly inaccessible. Parents would need to be willing to pay significant money into this.

If that was their motivation then why not simply offer an opt-in to heavily moderated servers? And a toggle to make it where that's all you see (if you want). This would not only make their job much easier, since presumably relatively few people want this sort of moderation, but would also increase the overall satisfaction of their entire userbase. People who want moderation for whatever reasons, can have it. Those that don't - don't have to.

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A tangential, but related, issue I've observed is that there seem to be an increasing number of measures being carried out in society that, in effect, drive widespread self censorship. Any interesting conversation, regardless of how otherwise sanitary, may be likely to motivate somebody to want to "report" others. See any thread on, for instance, dark matter. An esoteric scientific concept, yet one where emotions run wild.

The only choice, in scenarios where reporting is likely to lead to penalties that are intolerable, is to simply not say anything at all that might cause even a single ripple in the water. And that is, in effect, not especially different than life in all of these unfree societies we were supposed to have learned from. The fact that we now seem to be becoming one of those societies, even if by a more novel path, is becoming increasingly apparent.

> I'm not saying [...] any of this is good

You opened with "I don't think it's a bad thing"

Since I am not a parent, my opinion doesn’t count for much—but when I imagine myself one, I wish me and my kids could have an open-source sandbox game that is fully owned by us and is playable on our own infrastructure without any further involvement of game publisher.

No marketplace with coins, no microtransactions, no mining my child’s PII before you allow to play a game I bought, no online login screen, no platform or “community” of any kind (not even if it’s “for kids”, Roblox is an example of what kind of people it becomes a magnet for), no unknown corporate moderators for my family server, nothing but a fun game.

(And because dedicated developers who actually listen to player feedback must be paid appropriately, definitely take my money for every new major update.)

Minecraft used to be a great example of such a game, until it got bought by Microsoft.